One of the leaders in the field of Futures studies is Sohail Inayatullah. He is a big picture man, the forest from the trees type of a person, except that the forests he describes are ten, fifty or a hundred years into the future. I didn't just stumble into this rarefied world of Futures studies by accident. In fact Sohail is an old high school classmate of mine. We reconnected briefly several years ago by email. I looked up some of his work and was intrigued by what I read.
In these uncertain times, predictions about the future are always interesting reads. But there is an added interest in Sohail's writing. His is a non-Western, non-Eurocentric point of view.
For all of the twentieth century to the present, the West has dominated the World technologically, culturally and politically. Almost all non-Western countries, in charting their development look at Western models as examples to emulate because, to them, the West equals modernity. In nearly all fields of endeavor from economic development, to urban planning to running institutions and businesses, it is the standards and norms set by the West that people strive to follow. Even the intellectual elites in most non-Western countries, who are often Western educated, will -consciously or not- subsume a Western perspective. This is not meant to be a blanket indictment of all things Western. However, Western ways are sometimes are incompatible with the cultural, religious, geographic and geopolitical realities of non-Western countries and societies. Moreover, some Western ways are just simply wrong. Because of their success, the West has also largely determined the historical narrative of the twentieth century. That may change with the emergence of China and India as major economic economic and political powers.
Summary: The argument made in this article that there are generally two foundational global futures – the artificial (globalization-technologization) era and the communicative-inclusive era. The basic perspective in the first scenario is that things rise – more progress, more technology, more development, more wealth and more individuality. This is generally the view of older age cohorts and those in the center of power. The second scenario is focused on inner and social transformation, whether because of green or spiritual values or because of the wise and moral use of technology. This is the vision of those marginal to the system - youth, women, the "others" - it is idealistic, and not beholden to the values of the Market or State but firmly entrenched in the People's Sector. In contrast to the exponential curve of the first scenario, this scenario has a cyclical curve (returning to a more stable time) in some variations and a spiral curve (a return to traditional values but in far more inclusive terms) in other variations.
These two scenarios, images of the future, oscillate in the West. The West needs the latter, its alter-ego, to refresh itself. Within this over all pattern, Collapse remains the fear (technology gone wrong or overpopulation from the South either because of the exploitation of nature or over-concentration of power and wealth) that spurs the West to constantly create new futures. The image of collapse is used as a call to action, to either join the technology revolution or the consciousness revolution, than as a firm belief in the end of the world.
We also argue that the West is by definition in crisis, indeed, crisis – the threat of collapse or a return to a slower time (an imagined past when men were men and economies were local, with chaos controllable) is how it refreshes itself. Without these two pillars, the West would have fallen to the way side and other civilizations would have reigned supreme.
In contrast to the West, the non-West follows a different pattern. The ego of the non-West has now been constructed by the West, such that as much as the non-West resists Westernization, it embraces it, becoming even more Western than the West, as, for example, Japan or Malaysia. The alter-ego, however, comes across in two ways: first as traditional, ancient indigenous knowledge, generally, focused not on the Western utopia but on the Indic and Sinic eupsychia – the cultivation and perfection of the self. Related to this concern is the self-reliant, localist, community model of development and social relations. Second, as attempts to not only limit their understandings at local levels but making new claims for the universal. This perspective is best stated by the Indian philosopher, P.R. Sarkar. His theory of agriculture as well as the worldview behind it, which he terms Microvita, offers a new vision of the future of science, society and particularly of food and agriculture. The article concludes by exploring the impact of Sarkar's theory on the future of agriculture and food. (click link above to read the rest of the article)
Here is another interesting article by Sohail Islamic Civilization in Globalization:From Islamic futures to a Post-western civilization .
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